The Rhetorical Stance
1IIiiiiil. .1IiiiII@
Wayne C. Booth
College Composition and Communication, Vol. 14, No.3, Annual Meeting, Los Angeles,
1963: Toward a New Rhetoric. (Oct., 1963), pp. 139-145.
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Thu Jul 27 10:35:002006
The Rhetorical Stance
WAYNE C. BOOTH
LAST FALL I had an advanced graduate
student, bright, energetic, well-informed, whose papers vvere almost unreadable. He managed to be pretentious,
dull, and disorganized in his paper on
E1nma, and pretentious, dull, and disorganized on Madame Bovary. On The
Golden Bowl he was all these and obscure as well. Then one day, toward the
end of term, he cornered me after class
and said, "You know, I think you were
all wrong about Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy
today." We didn't have time to discuss
it, so I suggested that he write me a
note about it. Five hours later I found
in my faculty box a four-page polemic,
unpretentious, stimulating, organized,
convincing. Here was a man WllO had
taught freshman composition for several
years and who was incapable of committing any of the more obvious errors
that we think of as characteristic of
bad writing. Yet he could not vvrite a
-decent sentence, paragraph, or paper
until his rhetorical problem was solved
-until, that is, he had found a definition
of his audience, his argument, and his
own proper tone of voice.
TIle word ~~rhetoric" is one of those
catch-all terms that can easily raise
trouble when our backs are turned. As it
regains a popularity that it once seemed
permanently to have lost, its meanings
seem to range all the way from something like ~~the whole art of writing on
any subject," as in Kenneth Burke's
Author of The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),
Mr. Booth is a member of the English Department at the University of Chicago.
The Rhetoric of Religion, through "the
special arts of persuasion," on down to
fairly naITO'" notions about rhetorical
figures and devices. And of course \ve
still have with us the mealling of
"enlpty bombast," as in the phrase
"merely rhetorical."
I Supfpose that the question of the
role of rhetoric in the English course is
meaningless if we think of rhetoric in
either its broadest or its narrowest
meanings. No English course could
avoid dealing \vith rhetoric in Burke's
sense, un-der whatever nrone, and on the
other hand nobody would ever advocate
anything so questionable as teaching
"nlere rhetoric." But if we settle on the
following, traditional, definition, some
real questions are raised: "Rhetoric is
the art of finding and employing the
most effective means of persuasion on
any subject, considered independently
of intellectual mastery of that subject.';As the students say, "Prof. X knows his
stuff but he doesn't kno\v how to put it
across." If rhetoric is thought of as the
art of "putting it across," considered as
quite distinct from mastering an "it"
in the first place, \ve are immediately
lan-ded in a bramble bush of controversy. Is there such an art? If so, what
does it consist of? Does it have a content of its own? Can it be taught?
Should it be taught? If it should, how
do we go about it, head on or obliquely?
Obviously it would be foolish to try
to deal with many of these issues in
twenty minutes. But I wish that there
\vere more signs of OUf taking all of
them seriously. I wish that along with
139
140
COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION
our new passion for structural linguis- Now the teacher was right, but the
tics, for example, we could point to the application of even such a firm princidevelopment of a rhetorical theory that ple requires reserves of tact that were
would show jllSt how knowledge of somewhat beyond my freshman.
structural linguistics can be useful to
But with all of the reservations made,
anyone interested in the art of persua- surely the charge that the art of persuasion. I wish there were Inore freshman sion cannot in any sense be taught is
texts that related every principle and baseless. I cannot think that anyone WI10
every rule to functional principles of has ever read Aristotle~s Rhetoric or,
rhetoric, or, where this proves impos- say, Whateley's Elements of Rhetoric
sible, I wish one found more syste- could seriously make the charge. There
matic discussion of why it is impossible. is more than enough in these and the
But for today, I must content myself other traditional rhetorics to prOvide
with a brief look at the charge that structure and content for a year-long
there is nothing distinctive and teach- course. I believe that such a course,
able about the art of rhetoric.
when planned and carried through
The case against the isolability and with intelligence and flexibility, can be
teachability of rhetoric may look at first one of the most important of all educalike a good one. Nobody writes rhetoric, tional experiences. But it seems obvious
just as nobody ever writes writing. What that the arts of persuasion cannot be
we write and speak is always this dis- learned in one year, that a good teachcussion of the decline of railroading and er will continue to teach them regardthat discussion of Pope's couplets and less of his subject matter, and that we
the other argument for abolishing the as English teachers have a special repoll-tax or for getting rhetoric back into sponsibility at all levels to get certain
English studies.
basic rhetorical principles into all of
We can also admit that like all the our writing assignments. When I think
arts, the art of rhetoric is at best very back over the experiences which llave
chancy, only partly amenable to syste- llad any actual effect on my writing, I
matic teaching; as we are all painfully find the great good fortune of a splendid
aware when our 1:00 section goes mis- freshman course, taught by a man who
erably and our 2:00 section of the same believed in what he was doing, but I
course is a delight, our own rhetoric is also find a collection of other experinot entirely under control. Successful ences quite unconnected 'vith a speci6c
rhetoricians are to some extent like writing course. I remember the instrucpoets, born, not made. They are also tor in psychology who pencilled one
dependent on years of practice and ex- word after a peculiarly pretentious
perience. And we can finally admit that paper of mine: bull. I remember the day
even the firmest of principles about when P. A. Christensen talked with me
writing cannot be taught in the same about my Chaucer paper, and made me
sense that elementary logiC or arithmetic understand that my failure to use efor French can be taught. In my first fective transitions was not simply a
year of teaching, I had a student who technical fault but a fundamental block
started his first two essays with a swear in my effort to. get him to see my meanword. When I suggested that perhaps ing. His off-the-cuff pronouncement
the third paper ought to start with that I should never let myself write a
something else, he protested that his sentence that was not in some wa,Y
high school teacher had taught him explicitly attached to preceding and
always to catch the reader's attention. following sentences meant far more to
THE RHETORICAL STANCE
me at that moment, when I had something I wanted to say, than it could
have meant as part of a pattern of such
rules offered in a writing course. Similarly, I can remelnber the devastating
lessons about my bad writing that Ronald Crane could teach with a simple
question mark 011 a graduate selninar
paper, or a pencilled "Evidence for
this?" or "Why this section here?" or
"Everybody says so. Is it true?"
Such experiences are not, I like to
think, simply the result of my being a
late bloomer. At least I find my colleagues saying such things as HI didn't
learn to write until I beca.me a nevvspaper reporter," or "The most important
training in writing I had ,vas doing a
dissertation under old Blank." SOInetimes they go on to say that the fres}lman course was useless; sometimes they
say that it was an indispensable preparation for the later experience. The
diversity of such replies is so great as to
suggest that before we try to reorganize
the freshman course, ,vith or without
explicit confrontations ,vith rhetorical
categories, we ought to look for whatever there is in common among our experiences, both of good writing and of
good writing instruction. vVhatever we
discover in such an enterprise ought to
be useful to us at any level of our
teaching. It will not, presulnably, decide once and for all what should be
the content of the freshman course, jf
there should be such a course. But it
might serve as a guideline for the development of widely different programs
in the widely differing institutional circumstances in which ,ve must work.
The common ingredient that I find in
all of the writing I admire-excluding
for now novels, plays and poems-is
something that I shall reluctantly call
tIle rhetorical stance, a stance 'Vvhich
depen·ds on discovering and 111aintaining
in any writing situation a p'roper balance among the tlu'ee elements that are
141
at work in any cOlnmunicative effort:
the available arguments about the subject itself, the interests and peculiarities
of the audience, and the voice, the implied character, of the speaker. I should
like to suggest that it is this balance, this
rhetorical stance, difficult as it is to
describe, that is our main goal as teachers of rhetoric. Our ideal graduate will
sb'ike this balance automatically in any
writing that he considers finished.
Though he may never COlne to the
point of finding tIle balance easily, h.e
will know that it is \vhat makes the
difference between effective communication and mere ,vasted effort.
What I mean by the trlle rhetorician'~
stance can perhaps best be seen by contrasting it with two or three corruptions,
unbalanced stances often assunled by
people who think they are practicing
tIle arts of persuasion.
The first I'll call the pedanfs stance;
it consists of ignoring or underplaying
the personal relationship of speaker and
audience and depending entirely on
statements about a subject-that is, the
notion of a job to be done for a particular audience is left out. It is a virtue, of
course, to respect the bare truth of
one's subJect, and there may even be
some subjects which in their very llature define an audience and a rhetorical
purpose so that adequacy to the sub'ject
can be the whole art of presentation.
For example, an article on· ~'The relation
of the ontological and teleological
proofs," in a recent Journal of Religion,
requires a minimum of ada.ptation of
argunlent to audience. But most subjects
do not in themselves imply in any necessary way a purpose and an audience
and hence a speaker's tone. The writer
who assumes that it is enough Inerely
to write an exposition of what he happens to know on the subject will produce the kind of essay that soils our
scholarly journals, written not for readers but for bibliograpl1ies.
142
COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION
In 11ly first year of teaching I taug11t
a whole unit on C'exposition:J' without
ever suggesting, so far as I can remember, that the students ask tllen1selves
\vhat their expositions were for. So they
vvrote expositions like this one-I've
saved it, to teach me toleration of my
colleagues: the title is "Family relations
in More's Utopia." "In this theme I
\vould like to discuss some of the relationships \vith the family which Thomas
~10re elaborates and sets forth in his
book, Utopia. The first thing tIlat I
\vould like to discuss about family relations is that overpopulation, according
to More, is a just calIse of war." And so
on. Can you hear that student sneering
at me, in this opening? What he is saying is sornething like "you ask for a
meaningless paper, I give yOll a meaningless paper." He kno\vs that he has no
audience except me. He knows that I
don't \vant to read his summary of faluily relations in Utopia, an'd he kno\vs
that I know that he therefore has no
rhetorical purpose. Because he has not
been led to see a question which he
considers worth answering, or an audience that could possibly care one way
or the other, the paper is worse than no
paper at all, even though it has no gran1111atical or spelling errors and is organized right down the line, one, two,
three.
An extreme case, you may say. Most
of us ,vould never allo,,, ourselves that
kind of empty fencing? Perhaps. But if
some carefree foundation is willing to
finance a statistical study, I'ln ,villing
to wager a month's salary that we'd
find at least half of the suggested topics
in our freshman texts as pointless as
mine was. And we'd find a good deal
more than half of the discussions of
grammar, punctuation, spelling, and
style totally divorced from any notion
that rhetorical purpose to some degree
controls all such matters. We can offer
objective descriptions of levels of usage
from now until graduation, but unless
the student discovers a desire to say
sOluething to somebody and learns to
control his diction for a purpose, we've
gained very little. I once gave an assignn1ent asking stu'dents to describe the
same classroom in three different staternents, one for each level of usage.
They vvere obedient, but the only ones
\vho got anything froin the assignment
were those who intuitively impoited the
rhetorical instructions I had overlooked
-sucll purposes as "Make fun of your
scholarly surroundings by describing
this classroom in extremely elevated
style,'" or "Imagine a kid from the slums
accidentally trapped in tl1ese surroundings and forced to write a description
of this room." A little thought might
have shown me how to give the whole
assignment some human point, and
therefore some educative value.
Jnst ho\v confused we can allo\v ourselves to be abollt such matters is
shown in a recent publication of the
E'ducational Testing Service, called
"Factors in Judgments of Writing Ability." In order to isolate those factors
which affect differences in grading
standards, ETS set six groups of readers
-business men, writers and editors,
lawyers, and teachers of English, social
science and natural science-to reading
the same batch of papers. Tllen ETS
did a hundred-page "factor analysis"
of the amount of agreement and disagreement, and of the elements which
different kinds of graders emphasized.
The authors of the report express a
certain amount of shock at the discovery that the nledian correlation \vas only
.31 and that 94% of the papers received
either 7, 8, or 9 of the 9 pOSSible grades.
But what could they have expected?
In the first place, the students were
given no purpose and no audience when
the essays were assiglled. And then all
tllese editors and business men an'd
academics \vere asked to judge the pa-
THE RHETORICAL STANCE
pers in a complete vacuum, using only
whatever intuitive standards they cared
to use. I'm surprised that there was
any correlation at all. Lacking instructions, some of the students undoubtedly
wrote polemical essays, suitable for the
popular press; others no doubt imagined
an audience, say, of Reader's Digest
readers, and others wrote \vjth the
English teachers as implied audience;
an occasional student with real philosophical bent wOllld no doubt do a
careful analysis of the pros and cons of
the case. This would be graded low, of
course, by the magazine editors, even
though they would have graded it higll
if asked to judge it as a speculative
conbibution to the analysis of the problem. Similarly, a creative student who
has been getting A's for his personal
essays will write an amusing colorful
piece, failed by all the social scientists
present, though they would have graded
it Wgh if asked to judge it for \vhat it
was. I find it shocking than tens of
thousands of dollars and endless hours
should have been spent by students,
graders, and professional testers analyzing essays and grading results totally
abstracted from any notion of p·urposeful human communication. Did nobody
protest? One might as well assemble a
grOllp of citizens to judge students' ca..
pacity to throw balls, say, ,vithout telling
the students or the graders whether
altitude, speed, accuracy or form was
to be judged. The judges \vould be
drawn from football coaches, hai-Iai
experts, lawyers, and English teachers,
and asked to apply whatever standards
they intuitively apply to ball throwing.
Then we could express astonishment
th·at the judgments did not correlate
very well, and we could do a factor
analysis to discover, 10 and behold, that
some readers concentrated on altitude
some on speed, some on accuracy, som~
on form-and the English teachers were
simply confused.
143
One effective way to combat the
pedantic stance is to an·ange for weekly
confrontations of groups of students
over their own papers. We have done
far too little experimenting with arrangements for providing a genuine
audience in this way. Short of such
developments, it remains true that a
good teacher can convince his students
that he is a true audience, if his comments on the popers show that some
sort of dialogue is taking place. As
Jacques Barzun says in Teacher in
America, students should be made to
feel that unless tIley have said some..
thing to someone, they llave failed; to
bore the teacher is a worse form of
failure than to anger him. From this
point of view we can see that tlle
charts of grading symbols that mar even
the best freshman texts are not the innocent time savers that we pretend.
Plausible as it may seem to arrange for
more corrections with less time, they
inevitably reduce the student's sense of
purpose in writing. When he sees innumerable W13's and PI9's in the margin, he cannot possibly feel that the art
of persuasion is as important to his
instructor as when he reads personal
comments, however few.
This first perversion, then, springs
from ignoring the audience or overreliance on the pure subject. TIle second, which might be called the advertiser's stance, comes from undervaluing
the subject and overvaluing pure effect:
how to win friends and influence
people.
Some of our best freshman textsSheridan Baker's The Practical Stylist,
for example-allow themselves on occasion to suggest that to be controversial or argumentative, to stir up an
audience is an end in itself. Sharpen
the controversial edge, one of thelTI
says, and the clear implication is that
one should do so even if the truth of
the subject is honed off in the process.
144
COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION
This perversion is probably in the long
run a more serious threat in our society
than the danger of ignoring the alldience. In the time of audience-reaction
Ineters and pre-tested plays and novels,
it is not easy to convince students of
the old Platonic truth that good persuasion is honest persuasion, or even of
the old Aristotelian truth that the good
rhetorician must be master of his subject, no matter how dishonest he may
decide ultimately to be. Having told
them that good writers always to some
degree accommodate their arguments to
the audience, it is hard to explain the
difference between justified accommodation-say changing point one to the final
position-and the kind of accommodation that fills our popular magazines, in
\vhich the very substance of wllat is
said is accommodated to some preconception of what will sell. "The publication of Eros [magazine] represents a
major breakthrough in the battle for
the liberation of the human spirit."
At a dinner about a month ago I sat
between the wife of a famous civil
rights lawyer and an advertising consultant. "I saw the article on your book
yesterday in the Daily News," she said,
"but I ·didn't even finish it. The title of
your book scared me off. Why did you
ever choose such a terrible title? Nobody would buy a book with a title
like that." The man on my right, ,vhom
I'll call Mr. Kinches, overhearing my
feeble reply, plunged into a conversation with her, over my torn and bleeding
corpse. "Now with my last book," he
said, "I listed 20 possible titles and then
tested them out on 400 business men.
The one I chose was voted for by 90
percent of the businessmen." "'That's
what I was just saying to Mr. Booth,"
she said. "'A book title ought to grab
you, and rhetoric is not going to grab
anybody." "'Right," he said. "My last
book sold 50,000 copies already; I don't
know how this one will do, but I polled
200 businessmen on the table of contents, and . . . "
At one point I did manage to ask him
whether the title he chose really fit the
book. "Not quite as well as one or two
of the others," he admited, ~'but that
doesn't matter, you know. If the book is
-designed right, so that the first chapter
pulls them in, and you keep :tern in,
who's going to gripe about a little inaccuracy in the title?"
Well, rhetoric is the art of persuading,
not the art seeming to persuade by giving everything away at the start. It
presupposes that one has a purpose concerning a subject which itself cannot be
fundamentally modified by the desire to
persuade. If Edmund Burke had decided that he could win more votes in
Parliament by chOOSing the other sideas he most certainly could have done,ve would hardly hail this party-switch
as a master stroke of rhetoric. If
Churchill had offered the British "peace
in our time," with some laughs thrown
in, because opinion polls had shown
that more Britishers were "grabbed" by
these than by blood, s\veat, and tears,
we could hardly call his decision a sign
of rhetorical skill.
One could easily discover other perversions of the rhetorician's balancemost obviously what might be called
the entertainer's stance-the willingness
to sacrifice substance to personality and
charm. I admire Walker Gibson's efforts to startle us out of dry pedantry,
but I know from experience that his
exhortations to find and develop the
speaker's voice can lead to empty colorfulness. A student once said to me,
complaining about a colleague, "I soon
learned tllat all I had to do to get an A
\vas imitate Thurber."
But perhaps this is more than enough
about the perversions of the rhetorical
stance. Balance itself is always harder
to describe than the clumsy poses that
result when it is destroyed. But we all
1-1-IE RHETORICAL STANCE
experience the balance whenever we
find an author "vho succeeds in changing our minds. He can -do so only if he
knows more about the subject than we
do, and if he then engages us in the
process of thinking - and feelillg - it
through. Wllat makes the rhetoric of
Milton and Burke and Churchill great
is that each presents us with the spectacle of a man passionately involved in
thinking an important question through,
in the company of an audience. T'hongh
each of them did everything in his power to make his point persuasive, including a pervasive use of the many emotional appeals that have beell falsely
scorned by many a freshman composition text, none would have allowed himself the advertiser's stance; none would
have polled the audience in advance to
'discover which position would get the
votes. Nor is the highly individual personality that springs out at us fron1
their speeches and essays present for
the sake of selling itself. The rhetorical
balance among speakers, audience, and
argument is with all three men habitual,
as we see if we look at their non-politi-·
cal writings. Burke's work on the Sublime and Beautiful is a relatively unimpassioned philosophical treatise, but
one finds there again a delicate balance: though the implied author of this
work is a far different person, far less
obtrusive, far more objective, than the
man who later cried sursum corda to
the British Parliament, he permeates
with his p,hilosophical personality his
philosophical work. And thougIl the
signs of his awareness of Ius audience
are far more subdued, they are still
145
here: every effort is made to involve the
proper audience, the au·dience of philosophical minds, in a fundamentally in··
teresting inquiJ:y, and to lead thenl
through to the end. In short, because
he \vas a man engaged with men in the
effort to solve a human problem, one
could never call "vhat he wrote dull,
however difficult or abstruse.
Now obviously the habit of seeking
this balance is not the only thing we
have to teach under the heading of
rhetoric. But I think that everything
worth teaching under that heading finds
its justification finally in that balance.
Much of what is now considered irrelevant or dull can, in fact, be brought
to life \\Then teachers and stu'dents kno\v
what they are seeking. Churchill reports
that the most valuable training he ever
received in rhetoric "vas in the diagramming of sentences. Think of it! Yet
the diagramming of a sentence, regardless of the grammatical systelTI, can be
a live subJect as soon as one asks not
simply "How is this sentence put together," but rather "WIlY is it put together in this way?" or "Could the
rhetorical balance and hence the desired persuasion be better achieved by
\vriting it differently?"
As a nation we are reputed to write
very badly. As a nation, I would say, we
are more inclined to the perversions of
rhetoric than to the rhetorical balance.
Regardless of what we do about this
or that course in the cUlfriculum, our
mandate would seem to be, then, to
lead more of our students than we no\v
do to care about and practice the true
arts of persuasion.